The ANNOTICO
Report
Beppe Severgnini, a
columnist for Corriere della Serra, one of Italy's
largest-circulation dailies,several
years ago, wrote "Ciao, America! " , a huge Best Seller in Italy, later translated into
English.
Now, he's back with "La Bella Figura:
A Field Guide to the Italian Mind"
The reviewer has
trouble with Beppe's
enumerable metaphors, and even moreso with one I particularly liked:
"Economically, Italy
is like "a Ferrari on the starting grid, its engine throbbing. But it's been there for a while now, and the race is
already on the third lap."
Also: "Italy is far
from hellish. It's got too much
style. Neither is it heaven, of course, because it's
too unruly. Let's just say that Italy is an
offbeat purgatory, full of proud, tormented souls each of whom is convinced he or she has a hotline to the boss."
Ciao, Beppe!
A
tour of the Italian temperament, conducted by a man with a metaphorical bent.
Washington Post
Reviewed
by Nancy McKeon
Sunday, September 3, 2006
America first came into official contact with
Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini
several years ago, when he turned a one-year stint in the United States into Ciao, America! , a delightful nibbling of the hand that was providing his
material. A columnist for Corriere della Serra, one of Italy's largest-circulation dailies, Severgnini
spent his American year right here in Washington
-- improbably enough, three blocks from my house, which may have heightened my
enjoyment of his forays into real estate and the upper reaches of Rockville
Pike.
He wrote that
book for the Italian market, where it was called Un Italiano in America and became a huge bestseller. He issued it in English
for the international market. After all, we enjoy laughing at ourselves and are
as baffled as outsiders by our giant mattress sales and the plethora of
breakfast cereals at the supermarket. And we enjoy the occasional bits of good
news, such as Severgnini's
take on the bureaucracy involved in getting a Social Security card or telephone
service: "Having trained on the Italian version [of bureaucracy], we feel
like a matador faced with a milk cow. It's
a pushover."
In half-a-dozen
lighthearted books, Severgnini has also lampooned the
English ( Inglesi ), the English language ( L'Inglese
) and Italian tourists ( Italiani con Valigia ) -- as well as himself -- so it seems a
natural progression for him to attempt a luscious disquisition on the Italian
national character some 40 years after Luigi Barzini's classic, The Italians .
Despite Barzini's
attempts to disrupt all the clichis about Italians' charm, we Americans have clung to our notions
about his countrymen, sometimes infantilizing them, seeing them as simpler than
ourselves (when we're not seeing them
as impossibly cunning), less plagued by modernity (despite the little cellulari that were
pasted to their ears in the street long before it was the fashion here). But Severgnini seems determined to restore and psychologically
update those charms and eccentricities, making them appeal to a generation of
American travelers who feel they "know" their Italian hosts.
Presenting a
"field guide" to the mind, Italian or other, does not give the author
a lot of room to move around in, so he offers a construct: Thirty places in 10
days. Sounds straightforward, but it's
not. Severgnini's
places are rather high-concept, including Malpensa (Milan's international airport); highways, restaurants,
churches, the beach and television. We bounce from Milan
to Tuscany to Rome
to Naples to Sardinia (plus an odd dip into
Bahia, in Brazil),
or at least that's what we're told -- there's
very little evidence of regional differences here.
Before we launch
ourselves, the author announces that "Italy is far from hellish. It's got too much style. Neither is it heaven, of
course, because it's too unruly. Let's just say that Italy is an offbeat purgatory, full
of proud, tormented souls each of whom is convinced he
or she has a hotline to the boss." While you're
still trying to figure out which country on the planet isn't filled with such souls, Severgnini
takes it a step further: "Italy is the only workshop in the world that can
turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis,"
referring, in case you skipped those art history classes, to the Renaissance
painter and, in case you've been
avoiding the news, to the recently defeated prime minister. Hmm, what about China -- Qing dynasty porcelains and Tiananmen Square? The United States -- the Bill of Rights and fried Twinkies?
And so it goes,
with the author so busy being droll that we sometimes lose his point entirely,
struggling so hard to tread water amid his many metaphors that, well, I won't succumb to metaphor extension here -- it's just exhausting after a while. (Just remember
that, economically, Italy
is like "a Ferrari on the starting grid, its engine throbbing. But it's been there for
a while now, and the race is already on the third lap.")
Severgnini is at his best when he's delivering Italy in real context (you know,
reporting) -- about the role of Vespas in the
post-war nation, about its contretemps with the European Union. But his neatly
packaged apergus keep coming at us:
"In other
words, if you want to understand Italy, forget the guidebooks. Study
theology."
"You've been to Italy when you know the result of
the Juventus game, not before."
"You'll have to understand the piazza if you want to
find out what goes on inside an Italian's
head."
"The Italian
mind is an exotic location that deserves a guided tour."
Every stop on our
10-day tour gets this kind of pronouncement:
The airport:
"Malpensa encapsulates the nation." Okay,
whatever.
The coffee bar:
"Like an English club, an Italian bar is a place of long lingerings, yet it's
also a place for swift passings-through, like a
market in China."
Huh? "It's a place where you
can clinch a deal, sort out an evening, start a new working relationship, or
end an affair over an espresso. Standing at the bar, usually.
Vertical emotions hold no fears for Italians." Double huh?
The now-frenetic
Italian weekend: "A Po Valley skier rents a chalet in Switzerland and
then commutes. Once, her ancestors made a similar trip, but they didn't have a ski rack on the roof of the car." The
latter sentence may be a reference to Italian laborers who had to sign on as guest
workers in Switzerland
for lack of work at home, but that's
just a guess (and the use of the word "ancestors" suggests Otzi, the Stone Age ice man found in the Italian Alps, not
the Po Valley skier's Uncle
Giuseppe).
Am I silly to
attempt such scrutiny of something that is obviously harmless entertainment? Perhaps. But it's
annoying to try to read while alarm bells -- Something's
wrong! Something's wrong! -- keep
going off in your brain. And with La Bella Figura , it gets very
noisy in there indeed.
Oh yes, the bella figura : For those who don't
know, it means cutting a good figure. But we're
assured that such an expression is uniquely Italian, that it's quite different from the plain old "making a
good impression."
If there's an overall criticism to be made of a book that
does in fact have its entertaining moments, it's
that the Italian mind we get trapped inside of for too long is the clever but
not totally reliable one belonging to Beppe Severgnini. 7
Nancy McKeon
is acting Food editor of The Washington
Post.
LA BELLA
FIGURA
A Field Guide
to the Italian Mind
By Beppe Severgnini
Translated
from the Italian by Giles Watson
Broadway. 217 pp. $23.95